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The effect of compressing secondary schooling on higher education decisions

The sustainability of social security systems in many European countries is at risk due to population aging. Many suggestions to increase the share of working-age individuals deal with raising the age for full pension eligibility. A fundamental education reform in Germany extends the working life from the other side: A major education reform in Germany reduced the length of the academic high...

Andreas Thiemann has successfully defended his dissertation

Andreas Thiemann, department of Public Economics, has successfully defended his dissertation at Freie Universität Berlin. The dissertation with the title “Essays in Social Policy" was supervised by Peter Haan (DIW, Freie Universität Berlin) and Frank Fossen (Freie Universität Berlin). The Dean Prof. Dr. Helmut Lütkepohl congratulates him on his success!

Automatic Coding of Occupations

Data Dissemination, Documentation, and User Support

A major goal of the NEPS is to provide scientific use data to the international research community. For this purpose, the NEPS has set up a Research Data Center (RDC) that offers a comprehensive portfolio of services, allowing researchers to gain access to and work with NEPS data effectively. The RDC’s support concept combines well-known approaches with innovative means of data documentation, data ...

Management of Metadata: An Integrated Approach to Structured Documentation

This chapter discusses the core elements of the metadata strategy striving for a structured approach to documentation, which is necessary to efficiently link, deduplicate, re-use, and present all information in two languages for the six panels and two school-reform studies of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). For this purpose, the NEPS Data Center has implemented a relational database that ...

String Coding in a Generic Framework

For many questions in the social sciences that are supposed be answered with survey data, reliable and detailed information about occupations is crucial. As classifications for occupations are very extensive and complex, it is not feasible to simply present a full scheme to the respondent. To overcome this issue, an open string is queried from the respondent and later converted to an appropriate entry ...

Credit Rating Agency Downgrades and the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crises

This paper studies the reaction of the Euro's value against major currencies to sovereign rating announcements from Moody's, S&P and Fitch CRAs during the Eurozone debt crisis in 2010–2012 based on event study methodology combined with GARCH models. We also analyze how the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish government long-term bonds were affected by CRA announcements. Our results reveal ...

Equity Fund Flows and Stock Market Returns in the US before and after the Global Financial Crisis: A VAR-GARCH-In-Mean Analysis

The 2008—2009 global financial crisis has raised new questions about the relationship between equity fund flows and stock market returns. This paper analyses it using US monthly data over the period 2000:1-2015:08. A VAR-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean model with a BEKK representation is estimated, and a switch dummy for the global financial crisis is also included. We find causality-in-mean from stock market returns ...

Extreme Weather Events and Child Height: Evidence from Mongolia

We provide new evidence on the impact of one severe weather event on child height in Mongolia. While previous studies mostly focus on rainfall shocks in tropical or dry climate areas, our focus is on the extremely harsh winter that hit Mongolia in 2009–10. The severe winter—locally referred to as a dzud—caused catastrophic damage and resulted in the death of 10.3 million livestock. Our analysis identifies ...

The Self-Medication Hypothesis: Evidence from Terrorism and Cigarette Accessibility

We use single equation and system instrumental variable models to explore if individuals smoke during times of stress (the motivation effect) and if they are successful in self-medicating short-term stress (the self-medication effect). Short-term stress is a powerful motivator of smoking, and the decision to smoke could trigger biological feedback that immediately reduces short-term stress. We use ...